This repository is a utility library for using cwipc objects to represent pointclouds. It is part of the cwipc suite, https://github.com/cwi-dis/cwipc, and should generally be installed or built as part of that suite.
The idea behind a cwipc pointcloud object is that it represents a pointcloud (with x/y/z coordinates, r/g/b values and possibly information on which camera angle the point was captured from) without having to include the whole PCL Point Cloud Library API if you do not need it.
the idea is that you can pass a cwipc object around without knowing what is inside it, and if the receiving end also has PCL knowledge it can access the pointcloud data without it having been copied. And if a receiver does need access to the individual point data it will only be copied when it arrives there (so a receiver can allocate buffers in the right type of memory, etc).
The current design document is in pointcloud-api.md.
The library contains utility functions to read and write a cwipc object from a .ply file. There are also functions to read/write the binary representation of a cwipc but these are mainly for debugging (the binary representation is not portable between machines).
Bindings for C, C++ and Python are included. C# bindings are not currently included, ask us.